Posts I’m at the Art Librarians’ Conference, MySpace is an ArtSpace in Brisbane.
Me – Second Life as a platform: social space, art space, real space
My keynote was called – to keep with the theme – Second Life as a platform: social space, art space, real space. It involved about 17 minutes of machinima that I created to illustrate my points, so I’m not inserting the slides here as they don’t make too much sense. Basically I talked about:
1. Fly over of Info Island. Machinima
2. What is Second Life, Limitations, Possibilities and Libraries
3. Questions about Real Life concepts raised by a MUVE:
- Identity
- Individuality
- The Body
- Ability and disability
- Having a voice
- “Game” and “play”
- Time
- Location
- Co-presence
- Intellectual property
- Public and private
- Lawfulness
- Consumption
- Visual metaphor
- Representation
- Aesthetics
- Exhibit
4. Art Objects not born digital in Second Life – Sistine Chapel at Vassar island and Machinima of Info Island art gallery and Museum of Music
5. Art Objects born digital in Second Life - Machinima of Babelswarm, the Australian Arts Council funded project
6. Art in the Space between Real Life and Second Life – Augmented Reality. Excerpt from little movie of Julian Stadon’s SLARIPS installation
7. I finished up with a clip of an art environment built just to make a movie. I didn’t want to spoil the mood afterward, so the last two slides just said “Aaaaaaaah” and “Thank You”. Robbie Dingo’s Watch the Worlds clip is below so you understand what I mean:
Axel Bruns, who was the second keynote speaker has blogged the session, New Impulses for Libraries: Drawing on Second Life and Produsage… so you can check out what a third party thought.
Axel Bruns – All the world’s a library: produsage and user-led curation
Axel’s talk was just what I wanted to hear about. In his book Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life and Beyond: From Production to Produsage he raises the idea of “produsage”. It’s the idea that in order to use new web sites, you have to produce output. He showed a great image of peoples’ tracks in the snow – making similar points to Stephen Abram with his “Paths of Intention” slide. People will find their own ways to navigate and organise information and often will join together to create the pathways. Axel talked a lot about tagging and folksomies and what this means to librarianship. He still saw our jobs as important, but pointed out that there is just too much information to control and catalogue, so we are going to have to find different ways. I liked his point about “folk experts” – these are the people who know about the knowledge in their area and how it is organised online – maybe they will become the librarians of the future.His slides are online at his blog All the World’s a Library: Produsage and User-Led Curation (ARLIS 2008)
Kelly McKeon – The “virtual clubhouse” the ARLIS/ANZ website, web 2.0 and our future
This used material from a paper given by Kelly and Ellen Thompson at the last ALIA conference: M IS FOR MEETING PLACES: THE ARTS LIBRARIES SOCIETY OF AUSTRALIA AND NEW ZEALAND BUILDS A VIRTUAL WEB 2.0 ‘CLUBHOUSE
The ARLIS website was created by students in the Creative Industries Faculty at QUT using drupal. They had three groups of students working on the project and were able to take the idea that most appealed to them. Most universities have units where students who have to complete a task like this for third parties – it’s how we get environments built on Murdoch University Island in Second Life. If you are a library that wants something specific and techie prototyped, you may want to contact the techie faculties at your local uni to see whether you can form a partnership.
Tom Irwin – From Inhouse Index to Online Database
The University of Auckland has maintained a press cuttings index about NZ art and artists since the 1960′s. They also had n in-house journals index. To talked about the decisions and process to create a database using Inmagic, which is ultimately marketed as a site license at NZ$2500. He talked about the standardisation between the two resources and how they augmented the “Getty Art and Architecture Thesaurus” with some of their own local terms. It raised questions to me about Open Access in light of the recent Brisbane Declaration .
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I’m really enjoying the mix of formal and informal sessions. There have been tours and formal meetings and a gallery exhibition as well as papers.
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